It is growing darker, and the flashes from our guns take a ruddier tinge. The principal occupation of our officers, staff and line, has been to move along among the men and prevent the waste of ammunition. Every now and then some young redskin, ambitious of distinction, will suddenly pop from behind a sheltering hummock and dash at the top of his pony's speed along our front, but over three hundred yards away, taunting and blackguarding us in shrill vernacular as he does so. Then the whole brigade wants to let drive at him and squander ammunition at the rate of five dollars a second on that one pestiferous vagabond. "Hold your fire, men!" is the order. "Give them half a chance and some of the painted humbugs will ride in closer." By 5.30 the light is so uncertain that we, who are facing west along the plateau, and have the grim buttresses of the Buttes in our front, can barely distinguish the scudding forms of the Indians; but the flash of their rifles is incessant, and now that they are forced back beyond the possibility of harm to our centre, the orders are to lie down and stand them off. These men crouching along the ridge are Company "F," of the Fifth. They and their captain (Payne) you have heard more of in the Ute campaign. One of them, a keen shot, has just succeeded in knocking an Indian out of his saddle and capturing his pony, and even while his comrades are shouting their congratulations, up comes Jack Finerty, who seeks his items on the skirmish line, and uses pencil and carbine with equal facility. Finerty wants the name of the man who killed that Indian, and, learning from the eager voices of the men that it is "Paddy" Nihil, he delightedly heads a new paragraph of his despatch "Nihil Fit," shakes hands with his brother Patlander, and scurries off to take a hand in the uproar on the left. "The war that for a space did fail Now trebly thundering swelled the gale." Colonel Chambers, with his plucky infantrymen, has clambered up the cliff on the south, changed front forward on his right--practically, not tactically--and got in a flank fire along the very depressions in which the Indians are settled. This is more than they can stand. The sun goes down at Slim Buttes on hundreds of baffled and discomfited Sioux. They have lost their village; lost three hundred tip-top ponies. A dozen of their warriors and squaws are in our hands, and a dozen more are dead and dying in the attempt to recapture them; and the big white chief Crook has managed to gain all this with starving men and skeleton horses.